Words by Mia Timpano
George Gittoes is the fearless bastard (I mean that affectionately) who darted through Iraq, scooting onto tanks – ‘There’s no time to fuck around with [camera] filters’ – to interview US combat troops about their favourite music. The resulting footage would later form the most gut-pinching sequences in Fahrenheit 9/11 (you will recall the grubby soldier singing to the camera: ‘We don’t need no water, let the motherfucker burn, burn motherfucker, burn’).
Between burnt corpses (Gittoes would later be accused of developing a ‘post-traumatic stress disorder’ from this episode in Iraq, more on that later), he scuttled upon Elliot Lovett, then 22, rapping in Uday Hussein’s derelict palace. Lovett told Gittoes that Baghdad was the same kettle of blood as his US home Brownsville (Brown Sub, SUB, Subbers for life) – a Miami project, a slum.
‘You have people fighting turf wars here just as they do in Baghdad,’
Professor Joe Byrne, a former Brown Sub cop, told Gittoes.
‘I’ve seen them come with bazookas, for god’s sake.’
Gittoes later visited Brownsville with Lovett, a trip that forms Gittoes’ pounding, epic documentary Rampage – best described, I think, as a kind of wonderful trauma. Gittoes found the house itself, he tells me, ‘like a bus shelter,’ (in Rampage, he dips his camera into the stinking dumpster outside the house), the brothers, rappers, and the youngest, Denzell, 14, especially berserk: ‘No shirt! [he strips] Bow-Wow, you can’t touch me! Li’l Romeo, you ain’t nothin’! From the real ghetto, baby! S. U. B. From Brown Sub, ya heard me?’
When, during the course of the filming, Lovett’s brother Marcus was shot dead by a 16-year-old hit-child from turf rivals High Tops (a butchery quite possibly precipitated by the event of Gittoes’ camera), Gittoes, compelled to extract the brothers from the blood-storm, took Denzell to New York to meet a variety of record industry big cheeses in the hope of a deal. Though socks were consistently and vigorously knocked off – ‘The kid can spit,’ Fat Joe said – executives were consistently squirmy. Denzell rapped about drugs, booze, seeing dead bodies on the way to school. One executive asked, ‘Are you an angry person?’ Denzell was unmoved.
Gittoes: Like, here’s a kid who’s got nothing. And yet Denzell, like all great artists – you know, their family is poor beyond belief – wasn’t prepared to sell out. I would have been less impressed by Denzell if he’d said, ‘How high do you want me to jump?’
LL: Yeah, that struck me too, that this kid will not compromise one fucking inch.
Gittoes: He won’t.
LL: How were you feeling during those meetings? I mean, you took him there.
Gittoes: I thought that he was brave. Afterwards I took him across the road to the Brooklyn Diner or whatever; we had a couple of hamburgers and celebrated the fact that he hadn’t sold his soul.
(Later)
We had a terrible experience in London. We had the big Rampage premiere in Piccadilly, red carpet and everything else. Denzell’s picture’s everywhere, and he and [his brother] Alton said, ‘We’ve got to go and have a piss,’ and they were gone for a long while. What had happened was the security guards had thought they shouldn’t be there, and when Denzell told them that they were the stars of the movie, these guys had thought they were cheeky and beat the shit out of them, dragged them down the escalators. So here’s Denzell’s opening in London, and I find him unconscious on the pavement outside the cinema, and Alton raging like a bull with about fifteen, thick-set security guards. It was like Brown Sub had come to London. We had a full theatre, and I thought, ‘Will I get up and shame London and tell them what happened?’ Because Denzell had been bruised. And I thought, ‘No, I’ll just let him perform,’ and he did the best performance of his life. Curtain call after curtain call. He didn’t bitch to the audience about it; he just got up and did a great set. We never mentioned the horrible incident.
(I catch Denzell on his cell in Miami.)
Denzell: Yeah, there was a little altercation. The security guards told my brother to take off his hoodie. And I was like, ‘Take off yer hoodie? For what reason is that? It’s cold outside.’ You understand? So I told him to keep his hoodie awn! So I guess they felt disrespected. Who cares how they feel? We ain’t there for them. The situation happened where we were goin’ up the escalator, they called to the other security, they came to stop us quick, in a flash, in a hurry and everything. We like, ‘Man, look, man, we got a movie presentation awn; you know what I’m sayin’? So, you know, we belong over here.’ They’re like, ‘No, y’all can’t go this way.’ We was like, ‘Well, where the restrooms at?’ And they were like, ‘You can’t go to the restroom.’ I was like, ‘What you mean, I can’t go to the restroom?’ So I done walked off. He put his hands on me; I pushed ‘em back. He tried to grab me in like an aggressive way, so I wasn’t having that, you know what I mean? So I pushed him off me. But it wasn’t nothin’. We was back at it, went to the opening of the movie.
LL: George said you gave the performance of your life.
Denzell: Yeah, because there’s no pressure, you know what I’m sayin’? I don’t worry about the negative. I keep it real, I keep it straight up how I feel, straight up, no ups and downs, y’ dig? Just like a rocket ship, going in the atmosphere, out of the ozone layer, into outer space, into space, then outer space, you understand? Just like that.
Though Rampage is an unsettling anti-Miami postcard, punctuated with horror-shots of Iraq, and a truly vulnerable documentary, reviewers have preferred to whinge: ‘[T]here are problems here, not least of which is Gittoes himself. Not only does he inflict a dreary narration over proceedings, but he seems unable to stay behind the camera. Seeing him, a middle-aged Aussie with an unmistakeable air of smugness, is distinctly off-putting, especially when he muses later that his presence might have resulted in the Lovett family getting targeted by envious gang-bangers.’ The Sydney Morning Herald, in a rather self-righteous mood, asked: ‘Rampage tells an extraordinary tale, but at what price?’ David Stratten said simply, ‘It’s so irritating.’ But then, Gittoes’ art has consistently shitted in the establishment’s cappuccinos.
Gittoes: I just had an exhibition of my [war] drawings and John McDonald wrote, some difficult work improves with time, but Gittoes’ just gets ‘uglier, more brutal and depressing’ the longer you contemplate it. [McDonald was the one who said that Gittoes had a ‘disorder’; he also called Rampage ‘interminable’.]
LL: How did that make you feel?
Gittoes: Like being hit in the head with an axe. You wouldn’t like it. I’ve since written those words on a drawing.
LL: Why?
Gittoes: Because it’s heroic. Because I’d rather be like The Pogues than fucking [searches] Kylie Minogue. It feels sad. It also feels liberating to know that you’ve still managed to stay on the wrong side of the law. He [McDonald] goes on to say that’s the way the world is now, that it’s more and more depressing. But that is the way I feel about the world. Iraq’s turning to shit and there’s about to be a spring offensive in Afghanistan. These are the places I’m working in. I’m dealing with the real world. The stuff he likes is one step beyond what council’s have hanging on toilet walls. Abstract stuff with colour. He talks about cold reds and warm reds. But, fuck, what’s that got to do with life? They’re decorative pieces. They actually look like floor rugs to me. That’s what he likes. He wants comfort. He wants paintings that look like rugs.
Rampage is currently available on DVD through Madman.
Rampage the Album by Denzell Lovett, aka Demo, is currently available through Central Station.
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